Buzzword Nation
Buzzwords can work positively or negatively. They also have a trivializing effect for nuanced discussions when they are narrowly used by bad faith actors.
There has been a lot of understandable consternation about the way “woke” has been overused by commentators and politicians to explain modern calls for social and economic justice while simultaneously throwing unnecessary conflict into discussions of identity or its intersection with United States history.
It is now a “catch-all” term to address discomfort with the rising awareness of systemic inequality amongst generations of people increasingly gaining the language to discuss these issues with clarity and poignancy. Every time this term is used to describe all of progressive politics, young people on college campuses, or the 1619 project — the result is an atmosphere of insensitive trivialization that causes the overlooking and erasure of core truths to why Americans have become more aware and educated.
We are currently living in an era of labor consciousness and, of course, that means the intersection of identity, gender, income, education, and ancestry become highlighted in this collective process. It’s not a cycle that is foreign to the United States. In a nation with vibrant capitalistic foundations, we often fluctuate between periods that prioritize capital and eras that attempt to improve the systems plaguing labor. For example, the current bottlenecks in the access to social and economic mobility or the weaponization of tribal idiosyncrasies to weaken consolidated groups.
The current assault on language is an essential strategy for creating an environment that systemically dampens the development of discussions and works that truthfully explain contemporary times.
Women bravely forced a discussion about the ways they are attacked and sexually coerced by powerful men who can institutionally cover-up for their destruction and disruption — sometimes the shattering — of a survivor’s mental health in the process. A discussion about sexual manipulation in the workplace by leadership figures altogether is being had. None of this happened in a vacuum.
People of color learning more about their ancestors and their larger heritage’s struggles within America is not an assault on math education or Caucasian Americans. The increased knowledge around state-sponsored and moneyed interests’ involvement in terrorizing, dehumanizing, and robbing the ancestors of contemporary Americans (many times because of identity discrimination) certainly did not happen in a vacuum or get construed in a political think tank to attack other Americans.
Americans, as a whole, are gaining new consciousness towards the way powerful elites have manipulated democracy and communities to sink a once stable and sustained American middle class; that is not happening in a vacuum.
Commentators and politicians who focus only on the excesses of a movement or discussion while myopically not addressing the essential truths behind it are purposely perverting our society’s collective experiences for personal gain or self-righteous indignation.
This is not the nation we want to be.
Politics has always relied on familiar colloquialisms and popular slogans. In modern times, the amplification of mass advertising and mass media creates a more intense reliance.
We do not have to become a nation run on Madison Avenue-inspired buzzwords and lazy slogans. We the people choose a better and more substantive conversation.
